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Personality Secrets in Your MP3 Player
Jeremy Dean writes "Once past saying 'hello' and 'how are you?' to someone you've just met, what is next? How do we make friends and get to know other people? Psychologists have talked about the importance of body language, physical appearance and clothing but they've not been so keen on what we actually talk about. A recent study put participants in same-sex and opposite-sex pairings and told them to get to know each other over 6 weeks (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2006). Analysing the results, they found the most popular topic of conversation was music. What is it about music that's so useful when we first meet someone and what kind of information can we extract from the music another person likes? "
music is very personalized and ubiquitous. There's probably very few people in America who haven't heard the top 5 songs of the day, whether they like them or not. Music is also easily accessible. In 3 - 5 minutes, a song could deliver lyrics that could change your mood or teach you things - like a little psychology session. And, people usually listen to music at any time for different things. People have music to study to, dance to, listen to when they're happy and music for depression. The easily accessible 3 minute package makes it easy to have music a part of your life unlike any other form of media. Books require a lot of attention and time, and tv isn't as portable and requires too much attention as well. It's really not surprising that music choices are the biggest conversation topic.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Ha! I was right - just checked the paper, it was with 60 undergraduate students. Apparently the other topics of conversation were:
1) How drunk you got last night.
2) Which lecturer you hate the most.
3) Have you written that stupid paper yet.
4) Are you going to the club tonight.
I hate shit like this. Question: Do you want to know how to make friends, or do you want to make friends? Because when you start to look for the secret procedure behind friendship, you start looking at people as if they were abstract personalities, with some quanitifiable set of properties, and you stop looking at them as human beings. And this attitude can prevent you from actually connecting with them. It's completely absurd. Not everything is meant to be turned into cold science.
they said the average age was like 18. What do 18 year olds have to talk about with random peers? If you mix an accountant and a construction worker, they may have similarities in that they may have kids, be sick of the boss, have funny co-worker stories.
Most 18 year olds don't have profound achievements that have a commonality. If you have kids, you don't mind hearing about other people's kids. If you're in physics club, you probably don't want to hear about a wrestling match.
Studies also show that teenagers blow at empathetic responses, so it harder to tell if someone is interested by subtle clues. If someone follows along on the conversation, its a go... So music is the most common ground shared by all teens.
Except me, i really didn't ever listen to the radio.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
One thing I would like to see is musical preferences by Myers-Briggs/Jung personality type. I mention this because, although imperfect, I have found that these personality types will give you a lot of information about a person. Someone who is ENFP (typical 'party girl') is mostly only interested in having fun and would likely be really into the pop-music of the day, on the other hand someone who is ISTJ (typical accountant) is probably going to be far more interested in technical perfection and may like Classical or Jazz; the reason musical taste could be important is an ENFP will think that the ISTJ and his music is boring whereas the ISTJ will think that the ENFP's music and lifestyle are pointless.
It would be interesting to see this study taken further. I suspect that there is more to this than just coincidence - that is, one will probably find that people with similar tastes in music often have similar political/religious/philosophical views, education, perhaps even similar skills/interests, childhood experiences, etc. It's just a hypothesis, but I bet there's some truth to it. Any psychologists out there know of such a study having been done?
Deja Moo: The distinct feeling that you've heard this bull before.
I'm not quite 50, but I can get a pretty good feel for how I'm going to relate with someone by mentioning the Iraq occupation or global warming. They're charged enough topics that you can get a feel for the person's political, social, and religious leanings without the overt hostility you'd get from mentioning, say, abortion or affirmative action. The responses are usually along a broad spectrum and give enough color to figure out how sympatico you'll be.
Yesterday I was at a small party, the music was from an iPod. One song caught my attention, and I wanted to know what song and artist it was.
It would be nice to have this feature on the (wireless/bluetooth enabled) digital music players: an option to share the playlist, so I could get my cellphone and read (and store) the info on the music being played.
factor 966971: 966971
Haven't you considered the possibility that a large number of people can really relate to corporate shill sellouts because they would like to one day be a corporate shill sellout themselves? American Idol shows us how many people there are who are completely out of touch with reality and would give anything for the dream of one day being a sellout.
music is directly emotional in a way that movies aren't. it's also highly interpretive, so WHY someone likes something is as important as what they like. it reveals how deeply they think about that certain part of themselves that is ecstatic and interpretive.
:-)
there are very valuable emotions communicated by very shoddy musicianship. there are very bland emotions communicated by overproduced garbage. the conglomeration of what people like is telling at least of what they're going through at the moment.
it tells you if they're into ecstatic fun stuff, if they're into sad stuff, angry stuff. music is cathartic and healing, and it shows you what the person needs. it can be revealing if they view it as entertainment, or just background noise.
the kiss of death for me is, "I like all music," um... like what? "Oh, I listen to everything," and what are some bands you like... "[billboard top 5]" if people like music I don't like, but like it for a reason, and are interested in it, then I'm fine with that. but then, I'm a musician. when people ask me about painters, I say the same thing.
that's my opinion anyway.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
The Onion has a feature called Random Rules. They take a celebrity type person and put their MP3 player on random. Then have the person being interviewed discusses what happens to come up on their player.
It's actually a pretty good feature. I especially liked the one with Gerald Casale.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Well, for one, knowing what kind of music someone else listens to is a great way to find out a lot of cultural similarities between yourself and them. Pieces of music seem to compact weeks worth of communication in to a short length of time. If you and another individual are in to the same obscure indie rock band, you're probably going to have a lot of cultural connections. The thing is, it's never really about the music. The non-musical aspects are much more important. How we first came to hear a certain piece, who told us about it, who else listens to it, when it was from, why it was made... all of these are more important than the chord structure, lyrics, melody, and form of the song or piece.
IAAMusician, and let me be the first to tell you that coming to this realization was not easy at first, probably due to the fact that I had to first learn and internalize most of the fundamentals of music, which kept me focused on the structural aspects. That being said, I still have no idea what music is or why I enjoy to make or listen to it. I do know that most people refuse to believe that the reason they don't like rap music isn't because of the sonic structures or lyrical content of the music rather the fact that they cannot relate to the culture that is responsible for its creation. Most musicians I know refuse to believe this as well, and while I cannot even come close to proving my thoughts on this, I know that if it is not the most important aspect of music, it is at least partially true.
For example, last night, I was coming back from a friend's place, and I took a cab, not the easiest thing to do right after the Superbowl ends, especially in New York City. I was lucky enough to get a cab almost right away. The driver, as usual, was minding his own business. He was listening to a type of ethnic music typically known as Hindustani, originating from the Northern parts of India, near the Pakistani border, but also closely associated to Bangalore. I'm pretty in to this kind of music, the vocal styles, the tablas, the sitars here and there. However, he was used to the fact that most white dudes would probably rather listen to classic rock and offered to change to a radio station of my choice. I told him that I was enjoying this music, and immediately, he sprung to life! He handed me the album case and started telling me all about who this guy was that had written the songs, who the singer was, and tons of other information about the music and the culture behind it. Apparently, it was all written by this man, Rabindranath Tagore, who my cabbie enthusiastically told me was the first person from Asia to win the Nobel Prize, AND, that he had written all of his work in his native language. He was overflowing with pride. Not wanting to be the cultural hog of the conversation, he grabbed another CD case from the front and passed it back. It was a compilation of the Greatest Love Songs, with stuff like Genesis, Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner, etc... He had grown fond of listening to an Adult Contemporary station here in NYC and bought some albums and he was really in to it! I told him that if he enjoyed these songs, he would love one of my favorite songwriters, Burt Bacharach. At the end of the journey we both exchanged information about the artists we had recommended to each other and completed our cultural exchange.
So your musical preferences will have a direct relation to your cultural preferences. How all of this applies to todays hyper-culture, with it's multitudes of sub genres and opinions scattered left and right, I have no idea. I'm still trying to figure that one out. I wouldn't have a hard time believing that if two people are both into neo-industrial-hardcore-skate-ska that there would be enough of a cultural/personality match for them to make a good couple.
So, no offense to all of you Julie Andrews fans out there, but the sound of music really doesn't seem to be as important as the culture of music.
I've always prefered a command line interface. GUIs are such a cursory way to interact with a computer.
Generally the only time I actual understand what the band is singing about, is when I'm just about tired of the song. Even then I really don't hear what they're saying most of the time. When I sang for my band, the lyrics usually changed a fair amount every time I sang the song. I did keep some of the words the same, just because of the way they sounded.
If the words are the most important part of the song - then fine go listen to it, but you can drop the music part, since it's not the focus, and call it a poem, so I won't have to listen to it.
..........FULL STOP.
The best quote I ever heard about music was in a discussion about pre-fab boy bands where someone said "I prefer real music. Music made by ugly angry men who write their own songs and play their own instruments."
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
* Launch into a rant
I know you were joking, but ranting is a pretty good bonding strategy. Disliking the same things is a much better ground for friendship than liking the same things. NYT, PDF paper, Wikipedia